How George Clooney Upleveled My Multitasking and Added Countless Hours to My Life

“The American” with George Clooney. Literally the worst movie I’ve seen in my life. The most exhilarating part of it was without a doubt the promotional thumbnail Netflix uses to lure you into this life-sucking “art piece.”

After waiting 2 hours for any, *any* kind of payoff for the aimless tedium of the thing - some breathtaking twist, some stunning turnaround, hell even a Deus Ex Machina to wrap it all up - I watched as the progress bar filled with red and the end approached, thinking - with whatever the opposite of anticipation is - my God there’s going to be nothing. Nothing. And as he died on the steering wheel and ran into a tree (Spoiler!), I waited for some kind of illuminating postlogue to redeem the whole thing, and then. . .roll credits. Holy shit such a colossal waste of time where I could have been cutting my fingernails, staring out the window at a bum peeing on the sidewalk, or spell checking a Chinese takeout menu. What the fuck.

For years, as a musician, I would pore over foreign films looking for some sort of hidden artistry that was missing in our shallow, sell-outy American Hollywood crap. And time after time (after time after time), I would scratch my head wondering whether I had missed something exquisite or transcendent or whether the experience I had of modern European music was mirrored in the inanity of their film. Well the jury is back. It's inanity all the way down.

(Yes, there are some notable exceptions to be sure, particularly Rohmer’s 6 moral tales, which sadly could never be conceived in America, but that is the rare exception that proves the tenaciously tedious rule.)

If there had been some sort of trigger warning in the description like: “This is a self-indulgent French movie with no plot structure or character development, perfumed in a petulant, passive-aggressive condemnation of some banal cultural phenomenon ***disguised*** as a real movie,” then at least I could have prepared myself. But I could not imagine Clooney would bind himself to such a thing. How the hell did he get involved? Did they not show him the (2 and a half page) script before he signed on? For the first unending hour, I kept thinking, almost impressed at his breadth, that “this was the same guy who snapped and dazzled his way through Oceans 11.” But breadth aside, how the fuck did he make a criminal so boring? Well I suppose he didn’t. The film just sucked, and he got sucked up in the suckiness of it. Awful. (Illuminating postlogue: He produced the thing. Draw your own conclusions.)

Hollywood is cheesy and formulaic as fuck. Or at least that was the justification in the 70s for having a “multipolar” world where boring European movies could serve as a foil to supposed American predictability and commercialism. Disagree, but fine. But even if you concede that point, it’s been like forever since that’s been true. Why do we need someone rehashing an ancient artistic argument for crappy-but-at-least-not-Hollywood art today? I can’t imagine that in 2019 when you can finally get good vegetarian food in Europe, that they are *still* making old-skool self-important, shittily, choppily, and lazily edited, arcless dreck like this. Like I’m in shock. Are 20 minute pregnant pauses making a comeback in the age of Instagram? Or is that the social commentary that is being passive-aggressively condemned here?

I don’t know. I can’t remember the last time I felt moved to write a movie review, or really any kind of rant (this is starting to qualify), but I’m actually almost despondent at how bad that movie was. Like it was uncontent to just be bad but had to draw you into its badness as well, inflicting actual creative harm rather than just being something to roll your eyes at.

Perhaps it was because it felt like some sort of a betrayal. I couldn’t imagine that they could make a movie like that today. There *had* to be some magnificent denouement to wow us and fulfill the snail’s pace drip drop promise of the first 45 minutes. But by the time you realized it would never come, it was too late. You had already committed your attention for so long that you couldn’t go back. You just had to watch the end dribble out like an old man’s blobby ejaculation.

And beyond all of this is the obvious opportunity cost.

There could have been fascinating exposes, CSI-style, on the intricacies of the gun craftsmanship, the effects of the mercury tipped bullets, or any other tools of the trade (the fact that Clooney says “suppressor *or* silencer” when these two items are the same maybe gives you a hint at how much research they actually did on the shooting trade, which to me implies laziness or indifference over creative choice). But instead these are all opportunities left hanging and sucked up into faux-artistic silence.

There could have been even a feint at a motivation for the Swedes (who knew there were such things as Swedish assassins? Or that there could even be as many as 3 of them?) or some particular reason that the hooker charms him out of his life of crime. But because they don’t take even a second (through more than an hour of cumulative silence) to develop the characters, when he finally kicks the bucket at the end, you don’t really give a shit at all.

There is almost an interesting human moment with the priest in the cemetery, but even then. . .with no buildup to his paternity reveal (more spoilers!), you just kind of shrug, “oh well” and straggle on.

TV and film have gotten *so good* today that even the bad shit is at least compelling. Maybe you could get away with this kind of model 30 years ago before anyone knew any better, but the director should really just get back on his SSRIs and reconsider his life.

The one silver lining I can see from all of this is that some weeks ago, I found a meme requesting a Netflix search feature for “Movies that I can watch while I’m checking other things on my phone.” Boom. Top of the list! In fact you could probably watch 6 or 7 other French movies at the same time, while checking your email and trading on Coinbase, and still not miss a beat.

So redemption at last. Thank you George Clooney for giving me a purpose to my evening. I will eventually forgive you, but next time just give me a little heads up, man.